Nazi-Jewish production of Romeo and Juliet cancelled

Jewish artistic director pulls production after anger over star-crossed Nazi-Jewish love story.

London’s Icarus Theatre Collective has pulled its controversial production of Romeo and Juliet “with immediate effect”, and cut ties with its casting director, after a row broke out over both the proposed casting and the setting of the play in the Nazi era.

The theatre company’s artistic director, Max Lewendel, whose father was a hidden child during the Holocaust and whose grandmother was murdered by the Nazis, said that Icarus, an award-winning company, “apologised and are deeply sorry for the offence and pain we caused to the Jewish community”.

The company “recognise that we’ve made mistakes that have resulted in the Jewish community and Jewish artists feeling excluded and being hurt”, he said.

The concept of the Icarus production was to have a Jewish Juliet, a member of the Capulet family, who falls in love with a member of Nazi Youth, Romeo from the Montague clan. But when a casting call was made on social media there was no mention of the idea of Jewish actors taking roles in the play.

Additional outrage was expressed at the idea that Jewish Capulets and Nazi Montagues were on equal footing, despite an insistence by Icarus that, contrary to Shakespeare’s famous opening lines, “these are not two households both alike in dignity.” It is understood that the play was being radically edited to show a lack of balance between the two families and to ramp up the disparity until one family destroyed the other.

One critic complained that it was “‘a deeply misguided project”, adding: “Romeo and Juliet as the story of impossible love in the Holocaust? Using the Holocaust as framing for ‘the most hopeful of love stories’ dismisses every single bit of history of systematic murder and inhumanity”.

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Theatre cancels Nazi-Jewish production of Romeo and Juliet (Jewish News)